Pieces of
the largest laboratory to launch towards the International Space Station (ISS)
are coming together and Japan
couldn’t be happier.

More than
two-thirds of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA) Kibo laboratory awaits NASA shuttle rides to the space
station early next year at the U.S. agency’s Cape Canaveral, Florida spaceport. Altogether, engineers are
poring over two JAXA pressurized modules and a robotic arm as they
await next year’s delivery of external experiment platform to complete Kibo,
also known as the station’s Japanese Experiment Module (JEM).

“JEM is the
first Japanese human [spaceflight] facility,” Kichiro Imagawa, JAXA’s JEM
development project manager, told SPACE.com
in an interview. “I think it’s very important for Japan to develop them and launch
them successfully.”

JAXA has
spent about $3 billion developing Kibo, whose name means ‘Hope,’ Imagawa said.
The laboratory’s total cost, however, is about twice that when including the
module’s planned orbital operations and ground mission control center in the Space
Station Operations Facility at Tsukuba Space Center, which sits just north of Tokyo in Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan, he added.

The first
piece of JAXA’s laboratory was slated to launch towards the ISS in December of
this year, though NASA pushed
the flight to February 2007 following delays with its next shuttle mission,
STS-117 aboard Atlantis.

“We at JAXA
have been waiting for JEM’s launch for more than 10 years, so two more months
of delay is not a big problem,” Imagawa said.

Assembling
Kibo

It will take
some three space shuttle flights and a series of spacewalks between 2008 and
2009 to completely install Kibo at the ISS once NASA’s Harmony
connector node and Europe’s Columbus laboratory are delivered later this
year.

“In the
coming year, we will work very hard in order to have a successful mission,”
JAXA astronaut Takao Doi, who will serve as an STS-123 mission specialist
during the upcoming flight, said in a statement after his assignment to the
flight earlier this year. “With Kibo being assembled in space, we
in Japan
will be entering into an exciting new era of Japanese space development.”

Among the biggest
hurdles for Kibo’s development was ensuring it was safe for human occupants,
JAXA officials said.

“The human
facility is very much directed by the safety issues,” Koki Oikawa, JAXA’s JEM
development project function manager, told SPACE.com. “JAXA didn’t [originally] have
that kind of understanding for crew safety…I think that was one of the most
challenging requirements.”

Piece by piece

The heart
of JAXA’s
Kibo laboratory is its cylindrical Pressurized Module.

About the
size of a large tour bus, the module runs 36.7 feet (11.2 meters) long, 14.4
feet (4.4 meters) wide and includes enough interior room for 23 racks -- 10 of
them dedicated to orbital experiments -- according to a NASA description.

Kibo’s smaller
pressurized storage pod, known as the Experiment Logistics Module, is the same
width as its larger counterpart but only 12.8 feet (3.9 meters) long, enough
room for about eight experiment racks. It is slated launch towards the ISS during the
STS-123 mission.

The
Pressurized Module is due to follow during NASA’s STS-124 mission on April 24,
2008 with Kibo’s 33-foot (10-meter) main robotic arm and will be followed by a smaller, 6.2-foot
(1.9-meter) appendage.

JAXA’s
external platform, the Exposed Facility, will round out the laboratory in 2009.
At 13.1 feet (four meters) long and around 17 feet (or about five meters) wide
and tall, the facility is large enough to hold 10 experiments at a time for
space materials and exposure tests.

Japanese
astronauts gear up

Following
Doi to the ISS will be JAXA astronaut Akihiko Hoshide, who will help install the massive 35,000-pound
(15,900-kilogram) Pressurized Module during NASA’s STS-124 mission.

Veteran
JAXA astronaut Koichi Wakata will then become Japan’s first long-duration
spaceflyer when he join’s the space station’s Expedition 18 crew in mid-2008,
NASA has said. JAXA spaceflyer Soichi Noguchi, who flew aboard the Discovery
orbiter during NASA’s STS-114 mission in July 2005, is Wakata’s backup.

The
astronauts have been training
alongside Russian cosmonaut and Expedition 18 flight engineer Salizhan Sharipov and other crewmembers for the upcoming spaceflight, which will be commanded by
NASA spaceflyer Mike Fincke.

“It’s important
for us to assembly our modules to ISS and have it done by our own astronauts,” Imagawa
said of Kibo’s construction. “It’s very important for the Japanese people. It’s
a symbol, our JEM.”